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Anna’s Novel: St. Brigid’s Cloak

If you read my recent essay in Vox, you know the theme of mother-daughter relationships is one close to my heart. If you download the two sample chapters, you will meet Delia who’s trying to reclaim her lost fortune, and also her once-famous model mother.

Delia McDonnell’s past of portrait-sitting and consommé spoons, finishing school and Fifth Avenue mansions imploded twenty years ago. Now, in 2006, she’s about to take a job programming software for an automated call center.

Well, if that’s what it takes to make good coin. Delia wants money, even if it’s a fraction of what she once stood to inherit.

Then, Delia gets a surprising call from a top New York City hedge fund. They dug up her PhD thesis, an arcane mathematical analysis of subprime derivatives. Pooh-poohed by her department, it reveals a way to make billions if the housing market crashes.

Delia is hired and begins her New York life redux of eighty-hour weeks, six-figure show horses, and handbags with price tags like cars. Her multi-million-dollar apartment couldn’t be better. It looks out over her former mansion, today an embassy.

Delia’s hedge-fund boss has ties to her past. Big city. Small world.

Only one thing jeopardizes Delia’s slice of the one-percent pie. Turns out she has a conscience. How did she get such a pesky thing? She blames her erstwhile nanny and surrogate mother, long dead of an apparent suicide.

If Delia continues pursuing her fortune, she will help destroy the financial lives of millions, betray a friend, and forsake a precious legacy left by her nanny.

Holding back risks her own financial ruin. Worse: She could spark the ire of her boss. Who knows the lengths to which he might go—or has gone in the past—to deal with those who stand in his way?

SAINT BRIGID’S CLOAK is a riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags tale billed as Scarlet Johansen meets The Big Short. It is represented by David Black Agency.